The number of mobile computing devices in use has increased dramatically over the last decade and continues to increase. Examples of mobile computing devices are mobile telephones, digital cameras, and global positioning system (“GPS”) receivers. According to one study, 60% of the world's population has access to mobile telephones. An increasing number of people use digital cameras and some manufacturers of digital cameras presently have revenues of tens of billions of United States dollars annually. Digital cameras are used to capture, store, and share images. Often, the images can be viewed nearly immediately after they are captured, such as on a display device associated with the digital cameras. Once an image is captured, it can be processed by computing devices. Image recognition is one such process that can be used to recognize and identify objects in an image. For example, image recognition techniques can determine whether an image contains a human face, a particular object or shape, etc.
Augmented reality is a view of a physical, real-world environment that is enhanced by computing devices to digitally augment visual or auditory information a user observes in the real world. As an example, an augmented reality system can receive scene information from a digital camera and a GPS, identify objects (e.g., people, animals, structures, etc.) in the scene, and provide additional information relating to the identified objects. A user of such a system can take a photo of a scene using a mobile computing device (e.g., a digital camera, a cellular phone, a “smartphone,” etc.) and automatically receive information about one or more objects an augmented reality system recognizes in the photographed (i.e., digitized) scene.
There are now hundreds of thousands of applications available for mobile devices. Users can download and install applications (“apps”) that are interesting or useful to them. However, finding such applications can be challenging.